Kokkoku – 06

Enter Takafumi, the curmudgeonly patriarch of the family, who has the ability of summoning the Handlers at will on-lock. Naturally, this is very concerning given that this means that Takafumi harbors the murderous intent needed to call out the Handlers without even striking a killing pose. His thought pattern in itself is hazardous enough to the Stalled that the Handlers have to come out and try to kill him before he got his hands on a weapon. He is the most outwardly selfish member of the Yukawa family with how much talk he has of using Stasis to strike it rich, so to add “thinking strongly about wanting to murder people” to his list of morally questionable traits that makes him susceptible to being heavily warped by his encounter with Stasis to fuel any repressed, sociopathic tendencies that he kept to himself.

This ability, while absolutely dangerous, does offer Majima the chance to save her family from fading away into dust. Unable to find it in herself to murder a Stalled person, her plan to draw out the Handlers and eject them with the Yukawa’s help didn’t go as well as she would’ve hoped. It is a testament to Majima’s character though as she is in-touch with herself, and despite contacting the True Love Society’s assistance out of spite, she has only been concerned with seeing her family again all this time.

It’s an interesting arc for the character as her alliance with the cult made her come off like an antagonistic figure, but once she was alright with asking the Yukawa’s for support, she comes off as much further in the right than the Yukawa family. Majima’s main beef with them is very much relevant to how we see our protagonists as Jii-san had tried to bury all involvement with Stasis and keep his family in the dark about it despite Juri having lingering memories of both Majima and Stasis. It was bad enough that it felt like the Yukawa’s were able to live such a happy life in ignorance to their indirect involvement with her family’s disappearance, but to see their reaction to interacting with Stasis justified Majima’s decision to harbor resentment for them, especially after hearing Takafumi act like she’d be the one to use Stasis for monetary benefit. The ED did hint that she would have a secondary protagonist feel to her with how closely aligned she is with Juri, but this episode did a lot to make Majima to be sympathetic in her family tragedy in comparison to the Yukawa family feeling at-odds with people coming after them for their history with Stasis.

One interesting aspect of this episode is how much of the events will have a lasting impact throughout the remaining episodes. Takafumi’s pettiness and ability to summon Handlers at ease will definitely come back into the fold if/when the Yukawa’s situation becomes more dire. And speaking of their situation, Tsubasa being recaptured by Sagawa places power back into the cult’s hands in having control over the Yukawa family’s movement through Stasis. Majima and Sako’s affiliation with the Yukawa’s will also place them firmly against the cult if they were ever to try to show themselves in front of them again. The most powerful development is that Majima’s family were ejected from the Handlers, but only her big brother seems like he was safely recovered from the Handler bodies according to the previews. It will be fascinating to see where the anime goes from here as the stakes are continuing to rise for Majima and the Yukawa family.

Note – it’s actually her big brother, though it sure won’t look that way now.

The question of how Takafumi was able to summon the Heralds is an interesting one. Is he indeed just that messed up, or is it his special ability – like Ojii-san’s teleportation or Juri’s jellyfish ejection?

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